Serpentine Page 36

  Dominique was installed in the second bedroom of Apartment 503 and spent his first two weeks drifting in and out of consciousness. He could barely remember nodding assent when Gauthier suggested that his passport and traveler’s checks should be put in a place for “safekeeping” until he was fully recovered. And he was faintly aware that Gauthier appeared once or twice a day with a spoonful of “medicine” which, upon consumption, seemed to speed him to the bathroom, where his aching innards voided what little was left within them. Monique was his blessing, for she spent hours sitting beside his bed, her face showing concern over his torment. He begged now and then for a doctor, but Monique disagreed. Doctors were expensive. Doctors were unreliable. Better that he trust Alain, and her. They knew how to treat tropical illnesses. “Trust Alain,” she murmured. “Alain knows best.”

  Other fragile lives clung to Alain Gauthier, A.K.A. Charles Sobhraj, alias half a hundred other names, affixing weak vines to what seemed to be the sturdiest of tree trunks. For several weeks in the bizarre autumn of 1975 in Bangkok, a willowy and theatrical Italian woman known as Miss Simonetta became part of the entourage, moving into the apartment and sleeping on a sofa until Marie-Andrée decided that she was not a customer, but more likely the latest romantic interest for the lord of this curious manor. Thus did “Monique,” as everyone knew Marie-Andrée, angrily throw the Italian girl out one morning while Charles was prowling about Bangkok looking for customers. When she informed Charles of her action, he seemed less interested than if she had stepped on a tarantula and dropped it in the garbage.

  But later May dropped by on some pretense of business and congratulated Monique for the forcefulness with which she had dealt with Simonetta. By the by, murmured May, did Monique know that Simonetta was pregnant? Monique was startled. By whom? May smiled maliciously. “I don’t know,” she replied. But Alain had been asked by Simonetta to pay for an abortion. That more or less answered the question, didn’t it? “Alain told her ‘no,’” continued May. “He told me an abortion can be big trouble. It might bring the police. He gave Simonetta some money, I know that.”

  That very night Marie-Andrée demanded to know from Charles just how involved he had been with the Italian girl. Charles sighed and said nothing. Marie-Andrée let it go for the nonce, but months later she discovered Simonetta’s passport in a box of Charles’ personal papers.

  In early October, shortly after Charles and Marie-Andrée returned from Chiang Mai with the ailing Dominique in tow, an interesting new couple appeared at Kanit House and leased an apartment. They were both French, the husband, Raoul, being a short, sturdy fellow who was newly arrived in Bangkok to become a sous-chef at a leading restaurant, his auburn-haired wife, Belle, a half head taller, with a manner that blended both salt-of-the-earth practicality and Parisian chic. In their late twenties, both possessed a spirit of adventure. Their marriage was rich with love and exploration. Raoul had learned his trade in some of Paris’s best kitchens, but he became afflicted with a severe case of wanderlust and tried to obtain a visa for the United States. Disappointed to learn that it would take months if not years, Raoul looked about the map. A friend knew of a tempting job possibility in Bangkok, which certainly seemed far enough away, and romantic. “What would you say to living in Bangkok for a couple of years?” Raoul asked Belle, who would have set forth in a raft for Tahiti on an hour’s notice if the idea had been attractive. “Sure,” she said. “But where the hell is it?” Raoul scratched his head. “Don’t know for sure,” he said. “China, I think.” And within a few days they were off, arriving in what turned out to be Thailand. There they discovered a small French speaking community, a few hundred at best, but tightly knit as is Gallic custom. Quickly they became popular members. On evenings at home, Raoul prepared steaming kettles of cassoulet, or, if the sea’s catch was bountiful, a bouillabaisse. Their apartment smelled like a fine French bistro, and there was even new Beaujolais, almost as quickly as it appeared in Paris’s cafes. Chez Raoul and Belle meant hearty food, the latest jokes from home, and hot music from New Jimmy’s or Regine’s.

  During the steaming days while she waited for Raoul, Belle often sunned beside the pool in a bikini from St. Tropez. Occasionally she looked up and espied a lonely-looking young woman peering down from the fifth floor. Belle inquired at the manager’s office and learned that the woman was the wife of a local gem dealer. Quiet people. No trouble. Nothing much to tell.

  One dusk the French chef and his wife were walking up the apartment stairs—the lift had collapsed—and voices were heard behind them. “Ah, you are French,” happily exclaimed the man, who introduced himself as Alain Gauthier. “So are we!” Monique nodded shyly at Belle, who smiled back warmly to indicate that she recognized the woman who stood on the fifth-floor railing and looked down at the pool. The two women became immediate friends, both having long days to spend while their husbands worked in the city. Alain usually began his day stalking big game at the major hotels, the Dusit Thani, a favorite for Asian businessmen, or the Indra, whose shopping arcade was always crowded with Westerners, or the Siam-Intercontinental, built on lands leased by a royal princess and favored by Americans and Italians. Sometimes, if he hooked a customer, often Charles brought the potential score home for lunch, having notified Marie-Andrée to prepare a quiche or a salade niçoise. Often Belle flew into action to help set a suitable table to impress Charles’ customers, and sometimes she stayed to eat, being a handsome adornment for the little apartment.

  Alain fascinated Belle, even though she found him puzzling. His shirts for one intrigued her. They were always clean and freshly ironed—thanks to Monique—and they were always monogrammed on the front pocket. But the monograms differed; one day the letters read AG, another CS, still others later in the week. She could not resist asking why one night when they all sat around the pool sipping wine. “It’s for my business,” he said in a tone that cut off further inquiry. His manners were another thing. Though he presented himself as a man of uncommon sophistication, his table etiquette was almost primitive. His mouth was usually crammed with food as he delivered an anecdote, and if sauces dropped on his shirt front, he seemed not to notice them.

  “Does he ever shut up and let you talk?” asked Belle one morning after a lengthy night-before session with Alain, who had chattered throughout dinner of his plan to open a great chain of jewelry stores across Asia, with headquarters in Bangkok. He was thinking of calling them Goldfinger’s.

  Monique shrugged in Gallic fashion and stuck out her lower lip, “Believe half of what he tells you,” she said, testily.

  Raoul believed less than that. From their first meeting, he had been suspicious of the energetic gem dealer. There were too many disparities in the autobiography. “At various moments,” pointed out Raoul, “Alain has told us he studied psychology at the Sorbonne, on another night it was the law, then it was engineering somewhere else.”

  “Perhaps he studied all of them,” suggested Belle.

  “He’s a hustler,” pronounced Raoul.

  The one fact that could not be disputed was that Monique was the most attentive of wives. When coffee was served, she watched Alain’s cup like an overeager waitress, anxious to fill it without being asked, hovering nearby with the correct amounts of sugar and milk. She was bent on anticipating his every wish, often calling down to Belle in despair when Alain’s favorite dish emerged from her kitchen less than perfect. Belle had learned from Raoul how to salvage anything, even burned soufflés.

  Belle further noticed that Alain paid less attention to his wife than he did the dog, or the monkey. During evenings chez Gauthier, Monique was scant more than a serving girl, condemned to a corner of the room and silence, rarely intruding into her master’s conversation unless bidden. Her role was clearly defined: housekeeper, cook, laundress, and nurse—Dominique was still resident in the guest bedroom and on occasion staggered gray-faced and wraith-thin into the living room to find a bit of company. Alain always welcomed the young French boy, explain
ing that as soon as he regained his health Dominique was going to join his gem business.

  When the two women grew close enough to share intimate secrets, Monique revealed more about herself. She told Belle that her life in Canada had been boring and unfulfilling. She would have perished in Lévis had she not accepted Alain’s invitation to join him in the East. Belle was not certain that Monique and Alain were really married; the subject was evaded whenever she raised it. But clearly Monique wished to present herself as the gem dealer’s authentic spouse, and Belle was not one to tear down an emotional façade. One thing she suspected was soon confirmed—a lack of sex in the “marriage.” Once while the two women lolled beside the apartment house pool, Monique seemed distraught, and when Belle cautiously asked why, the answer was painful. “Alain is so busy with his work, he isn’t interested in sex,” she said. “It’s been almost a month.”

  That night, when Raoul came home, Belle could not resist revealing the discord between the couple upstairs. “I don’t blame her for being triste,” said Raoul. “She came all the way here from Canada to be his lover, and when she arrives, she finds out she’s supposed to be the bonne.” Raoul believed that Alain kept Monique around as a symbol of respectability, to go with the dog and the aura of wholesome family life. “It’s to impress his customers,” observed Raoul. “I don’t think he gives a damn about Monique.”

  Belle felt the judgment was harsh. If Alain was all that heartless, why was he taking such good care of Dominique, a French boy he had only known for one night before he brought him home and gave him the spare bedroom for recuperation? “I think that’s bizarre, too,” answered Raoul. “A strong young boy shouldn’t be sick that long with dysentery. It comes and goes—normally. He’s looked like the living dead ever since we first met him—and it’s been several weeks … Why doesn’t he see a doctor?”

  Belle nodded. The plight of Dominique had worried her, too. In fact she had asked Monique why the sick man had not gone to a hospital. “Alain knows how to care for him,” was the answer. Besides, Alain had an “investment” in Dominique by now. He expected the French youth to work for him when he regained his health. If Dominique chose to leave Alain’s home, then he would have to pay twenty dollars for each day he had been there.

  “See what I mean?” said Raoul. “So much for his humanity.”

  “It’s cheaper than a hospital,” said Belle in defense of her friends.

  “He might get well at a hospital,” said Raoul. “I think Alain just wants him around—for some strange reason. I think Alain just collects people and makes them dependent on him.”

  If a day’s hunting was unsuccessful at the major hotels in Bangkok, then Alain/Charles lowered his expectations and often dropped by the Malaysia Hotel, an establishment unlikely to be listed in any travel guide save those that catered to youth with bedrolls on their backs, and very little money hidden inside belts or pinned to Afghan vests. The Malaysia was a well-known stop on the wanderers’ trail that began in Europe and snaked its away across the mass of Asia. If one wrote ahead for a brochure, the Malaysia would arrive in the mail looking like a first cousin to the Hilton, rising modern, clean, and invitingly with terraces and palm trees erupting from a tropical garden. When the youthful traveler arrived, the hotel turned out to be faded, shabby, but not without an economical charm. The lobby was always teeming with youngsters and their backpacks, their costumes patched together from the international roads—Indian silks, Pakistani blouses, shorts, sandals, beads and bracelets that clanked melodiously when the girls strolled about.

  It was here one October afternoon in 1975 that Charles added two more to his entourage, a pair of French youngsters who by all rights would have worried a man in the kind of business that Alain Gauthier undertook. They were both young ex-cops from the French provinces, both in their early twenties. One, plump, was called Yannick, the other, tall and thin, Jacques. Though they had traveled for more than a year over half the world, they remained bucolic, trusting, and naïve. Charles hooked them in a quarter of an hour. That was all the time it took for him to learn that they were (1) trying unsuccessfully to find jobs as cooks and having no luck as they lacked Thai work papers, and (2) thinking about going to Pattaya beach for a few days.

  In Pattaya, suggested Alain/Charles, there were plentiful work opportunities, as the resort contained scores of restaurants. The bureaucracy of Bangkok was not as evident, and temporary work could surely be found. Besides, Alain knew several important people in the restaurant business.

  The next day, Alain filled his rented Toyota with an odd assortment—himself, Marie-Andrée, Frankie the dog, Napoleon the monkey, Dominique the sick Frenchman, and Yannick and Jacques, the newcomers and former flics. The drive was festive, French voices laughing and cheering on Alain as he threaded the small car through the terrifying—no other word will do—ordeal of Thai highway travel. The road from Bangkok to Pattaya is wide and excellent, but it is heavily used by trucks—each vividly painted in dayglow colors and occupied by drivers who operate the behemoths like kamikaze pilots (sitting on only a small corner of the driver’s seat and leaving the remainder of the cushion for Buddha, their constant and invisible companion). The custom is for overloaded trucks and overcrowded buses to play king of the road, straddling the center stripe, horns blaring, apparently condemned to eternal damnation if some other vehicle manages to pass. Corpses of dead animals—dogs, wild hogs, ravens—litter the route. Men with innards sogged by heavy beer lurch from roadside cafes and stumble onto the highway, risking a terminal squash, or causing a bus to plow into a soft shoulder and spill peasants from windows. And if this were not enough, hundreds of jitneys scurry up and down the road, picking up rural people and dropping them off a few miles later, like ants stepping lively around fallen trees. There is no more fearsome drive in the world for the unprepared, and each Monday morning Bangkok’s newspapers are filled with accounts of weekend highway carnage.

  They reached Pattaya safely, and Alain leased a second-class bungalow across the boulevard from the sea. Immediately Jacques and Yannick went out job hunting, while Marie-Andrée, ten pounds thinner, slipped into a bikini and took her dog to the beach. Dominique fell gratefully into a cot but could not sleep because the monkey kept dancing on his bedcovers.

  En famille they dined that night at a German restaurant and then strolled along the soft and lovely sands. Lovers were entwined, and moans in the moonlight could be heard. Some made love in the shells of abandoned, rotting canoes. The music of guitars and drums filtered through the forests of palms, and from above monkeys threw down overripe bananas. Thin, ugly dogs wandered about, looking for fights with enormous crabs that claimed premiere residence on the sand.

  Everyone was tired, but Alain would not permit the night to die so soon. He suggested a stop at a disco, and Monique, as if bidden, enthusiastically agreed. The two new Frenchmen were game, even Dominique, and for an hour or two the young people danced on the terrace of a hotel which featured young Thai boys trying to sound like the Rolling Stones. No one paid attention when Alain excused himself to make a telephone call and was gone for more than half an hour.

  When they returned to the bungalow, cries of anguish immediately arose from the room where Jacques and Yannick were to sleep. Thieves had entered the bungalow in their absence; their passports, travel papers, and every centime were gone! While they tore apart the room looking for their net worth on earth, Alain Gauthier entered and was at first angered, then the most tender of consolers. He held out hope. New passports could be obtained from the French Embassy in Bangkok. It would take a while; they check these matters out carefully. But in the meantime, the boys could live in Alain’s penthouse, help out with chores, and make the best of an unfortunate happening.

  Jacques and Yannick had no choice. They accepted. The next day, when everyone returned to Bangkok, the apartment was impossibly crowded. But Alain found a solution. He rented the apartment adjoining his—504—and installed the two new Frenchmen along wit
h Dominique.

  How happy he was! His face glowed on the first night that all assembled in his living room. Charles looked about, almost in wonder, his eyes meeting the eyes of those who needed him, circling the room as if at a reunion, stopping to touch shoulders and speak in private murmurs. Was there ever a more apparent reason for happiness, neurotic and twisted, but nonetheless, happiness? At the age of thirty-one, Charles Sobhraj at long last had assembled the components of what he mistook to be permanence and worth—a lover, children, people who would defer and obey and love him. He had one, two, three, four people—and two animals—whose lives were welded to his. He was pater familias. He was head of a family. His family!

  But what would become of them?

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  “Have spent a wonderful few days in Hong Kong,” wrote Jennie to her friends in Seattle. “Went to a monastery on an island, felt wonderful peace and good vibes, then ate lots of strange food at a restaurant. Probably fried spiders! Realize now my decision to return to the East is the right one. On to Katmandu. Maybe a stop overnight in Bangkok. More later. Love to everybody, Jennie.”

  Jennie went to an airline ticket office in Hong Kong and inquired as to whether she could stop over in Bangkok without paying more money. As the woman reservations agent studied the flight book, Jennie spoke pleadingly. There were Buddhist shrines and temples that she wanted to visit before going to Katmandu. The agent nodded and smiled. It could be done. Jennie could not only travel to Bangkok without extra payment; she could spend a few days there. The young American’s face reflected her joy.

  On the four-hour flight, longer since the end of the Vietnam War because Western planes are forced to detour around the Communist country or else pay hugely inflated air rights to the Hanoi government, Jennie studied a Buddhist meditation book. She wrote her name on the flyleaf of the slim red volume, for she did not want to lose track of it when she arrived at Kopan Monastery. Her friends in Seattle had given it as a going-away present, and it was special. She planned to keep it, hiding it if necessary. Was this a sin? wondered Jennie. Probably. But a minor one. She wrote in her journal: “Karma has given me a beautiful trip and a beautiful destiny. How happy I am! I am worried about surrendering all my possessions when I reach the monastery—I have so few! But I believe I can keep the vows.”